The Clean and Green Club

NOTE: Now that this column is restricted to paid subscribers, you’ll notice the reviews are a lot more in-depth, and I’m picking the books more carefully. Order links will be at the end of the reviews, when possible. Enjoy!

All Customers Are Irrational: Understanding What They Think, What They Feel, and What Keeps Them Coming Back, by William J. Cusick (Amacom, 2009)

Reviewed by Shel Horowitz, primary author of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green

Most companies, says Cusick, are completely wrong-headed about customer satisfaction. If they pay attention to it at all, they’re likely to implement useless surveys that ask the wrong questions (and therefore get the wrong answers) and don’t have much to do with the customer’s actual experience.

These surveys will inevitably skew positive, because the people who had a good experience are the ones who’ll take the time and trouble to fill out the survey. But even more importantly, they won’t bring back really useful information because customers’ (or employees’)perceptions don’t always have much to do with their behaviors,—and because customers don’t even know why they behave in certain ways or what they want and why, and thus can’t answer the questions honestly even if they have the best intentions.

Two examples from the world of product development: 1] a cell phone company focus-grouped a bunch of features. In the abstract, everyone wanted all of them. But in practical use, these customers preferred simplicity: a much smaller feature set that they could figure out intuitively and use immediately.

2] Apple, in developing the iPod, couldn’t ask customers what they wee looking for, because customers of a hypothetical future product couldn’t conceive of what they’d want until it was presented to them. In opening up this brand new territory, Apple’s engineers essentially had to make a flying leap into the consciousness of a buyer who didn’t yet exist.

Of course, this doesn’t mean companies shouldn’t satisfy their customers—or better yet, go past satisfaction into the realm of delight. But it means the “rational” linear methods of measuring and improving customer happiness are often not the best choices.

Instead, looking through lenses of neuroscience and psychology (specifically, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs) as it applies to customer behavior, Cusick looks at how companies can effectively collect useful information about how your customers think and act, and then harness this knowledge to improve the customer experience so it results in happier customers who spend more money with you, more often.

In Cusick’s world, customer actions and memories are rooted not in intellect but in emotion, as expressed in the way the customer relates to the “brand promise.” For instance, if you have dinner in a fine restaurant, and the food is fabulous, the service is terrific but something you can’t quite put your finger on feels a little bit off, you’ll remember that sense discomfort—and you might cross that restaurant off your list even though by any “rational” criteria, you had a good experience. But the memory it leaves is negative and that’s what your brain focuses on when someone suggests that restaurant down the road. By contrast, in an establishment that makes no promise of superiority, your expectations are low, and when those expectations are exceeded, you create a positive memory, even though objectively it wasn’t nearly up to the standards of the fine restaurant you left with a feeling of distaste.

A positive example: Southwest Airlines. Southwest’s original brand promise was firmly rooted in low prices, yet quickly gained a reputation for excellence in other areas, such as on-time record, turnaround time on the ground, and willingness to accommodate customers who have to change itineraries. Customers who choose the airline for price (and such extensions of pricing as not charging for checked baggage or even changing flights) are surprised and delighted that the airline exceeds the service e standards you’d expect from a company that promises nothing but price.

Companies can harness these emotions by “priming” the customer to feel certain responses; a big chunk of the book tells how, beginning on page 88.And Cusick points out that framing things to prime the right response should be a part of every corporate communication, not just marketing.

So if rational processing is not what motivates your customers, how do you create a positive memory? Cusick says you get there by measuring and examining behavior. Monitor what customers do, and did, rather than what they think. Or thought. And monitor the emotional reactions to various inputs, by putting your self in the customer’s shoes and asking “how will I (as a customer) feel if I make that choice.

And that mindset totally changes the sales process. Cusick tells salespeople not to state the value proposition, but to ask questions and listen, and let customers feel in control of the sale. Related to this: trust your customers; without trust, you can’t really accomplish customer satisfaction, let alone delight. If you have employees who are fully engaged and thus engage the customer, building in trust could turn your company into the next customer service legend, like the Internet shoe company Zappos (profiled a few months ago as a Positive Power Spotlight company; if you’re a Clean & Green Club member or a subscriber with archives access, read it here LINK). To sell shoes to people who can’t try them on first, you MUST honor your customers’ integrity and make it easy for them to both buy and return a purchase.

And Zappos is a company that understands customer service as an investment and a profit center, not an expense. It demands engagement of its employees, and will buy them out for $2000 if they finish the training period and don’t feel that commitment. If Zappos had in-person customers and not just online, you wouldn’t ever see customers cooling their heels while the staff is busy attending an all-employee meeting on improving the customer experience—something Cusick actually observed elsewhere.

Not surprisingly, companies that truly focus on customers make loyalists, even evangelists, out of their customers. (For more on this, see my brand new book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green.)

Yet don’t expect transformation overnight. Cusick’s final advice is to move gradually, implement steps that lead to small, achievable victories. Over time, the culture will shift, he says.